


A model of mercy and might

by Zara Hemla (zarahemla)



Category: Friday Night Lights
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-28
Updated: 2009-12-28
Packaged: 2017-10-05 10:10:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,147
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/40557
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zarahemla/pseuds/Zara%20Hemla
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>But Tim is Tim is Tim.  (Written Oct. 2007)</p>
            </blockquote>





	A model of mercy and might

**Author's Note:**

> I mean thats okay, you got to answer to you at the end of the volatile day, but a model of mercy and might? No way. --Aesop Rock

Billy doesn't find out about the thing between Jackie and Tim until a long time later. Tim disappears into a fluid stretch of partying and boozing, much like he has every summer since he was tall enough to see down a girl's shirt, and Jackie always avoids both of them, hurrying by when she sees him come out of his house, her head tucked down and her hair over her face. It's the boy, Bo, who lets it slip one day. He's a nice kid and he still comes and talks to Tim or Billy when he knows his momma's not looking.

"I saw Tim win the state championships," he says, sitting on the porch with Billy and tossing his football up in the air. It's dusty and still, and even the birds have given up in the heat. But Bo doesn't give up. "He was awesome. We saw it on TV."

"Yeah?" says Billy, not really listening, watching the sunlight bounce off the truck's fender, thinking of how his boss was a sonofabitch who wouldn't give a man time off for major surgery, much less an aching tooth. And how insurance companies could just deny coverage for stuff, fuck over honest working men. When he tunes back into Bo, the kid is still yammering on, apparently not needing encouragement.

"... he watched Rumble In the Bronx with us, and he likes Jackie Chan just like me. And he said maybe when I grew up we could be cops just like Jackie Chan was in that movie. And he slept over at our house, kind of like a sleepover, only you know, not with me, that would be weird. With my mom. And sometimes he would climb out the window. Ha ha! But my mom cried after she told him to leave. She said he was too busy, but that was just a line -- "

"Waitaminute," says Billy, holding up a hand. "Hold up, sport. Are you saying Tim had sleepovers with your mom?"

"Yeah, but he never brought his pajamas. I wonder what grownups do at sleepovers. Do they tell scary stories? Or maybe they wrestle like on those shows my mom won't let me watch. She said they'd rot my brain and turn it to mush. Then I'd be a zombie!"

Billy tunes out again; even the sonofabitching boss in his head is silent and astonished. Jackie, with her pretty hair that curls when it's humid, that sweet smile, and ... never mind. Tim is Tim. Billy knows it. Everyone knows it. Even Bo knows it, and eventually he gets tired of talking about Tim and wanders off to the next thing. Billy thinks the heat must've fried both their brains. But what other explanation is there?

The next time he sees Jackie he tries to look her in the eye, but she avoids him again, smashing her trash into its bin and then tucking her arms into her big blue sweatshirt, tucking her head down. She hurries by him so fast that he's left gaping at her, one hand on his truck's door handle, the other holding his keys like a doofus. She has to be over thirty, he thinks. In the light he can gauge her age a lot better, and she ain't no teen mother.

But Tim is Tim is Tim, and no one, it seems, can look Billy right in the eye and tell him the truth.

* * *

One Saturday morning in August, he is shopping for bread and eggs at the minimart when he comes around the aisle and there she is, in long dark jeans and a pink t-shirt and flip-flops. She is facing him but is reading the label on a carton of ice cream.

As he walks toward her, she looks up and smiles at him, a big smile with teeth, a friendly smile, but it fades as he smiles back and she realizes who he is. All the friendly just drains out of her face and turns into something so unhappy that it stops him in his tracks.

"Miz Miller," he says, not knowing what to call her or whether he should talk at all, "I'm real sorry that my brother – that he – treated you badly."

"No," she says softly over the hum of the freezer, still whooshing its cold air over her. "I should apologize to you."

This is so right, and yet so ridiculous, that he just fiddles with the bag of bread he's carrying, twisting the tie back and forth. She puts the ice cream back, shuts the freezer. Her face is blank now, polite, and she turns as if to leave.

"Tim is Tim," he says to her. "He's gotten everything he ever wanted, since he was little. He wouldn't know how to get on if someone told him no. So no one ever does; or at least if they do, it never sticks. You must of made it stick, because I haven't seen him since, except to say hi to. I wondered what it was, but ...."

"Bo told you," she says. "I'd have to staple his mouth shut for him not to blab it out. And now you know, that I cried over him, right?" Her hair is hanging in her face but she sounds angry, not sad, just really angry. "Cried like I was still in high school myself. Why am I even telling you this?"

"People say I have a friendly face," Billy says. "You'd know that if you bothered to look at it once in awhile."

She huffs a laugh behind her hair and then she does look at him, a silent clear look accompanied by a half-smile. He sees right away what Tim saw in her – the bone-deep calm of someone that has had a pretty good life and can offer beauty and comfort to others. Tim would have gone to that like a bee to sweetness; hell, Billy'd go to it too, come to think.

"I don't judge fuckupery," he says. "Cause then I'd have to start looking at my own."

She smiles and puts her hand over her mouth. "Fuckupery?" she says, behind the hand, but he can see a real smile in her eyes. And then Bo comes screeching round the corner holding a pack of Oreos and Billy squeezes by with his bread. He decides to get some bacon too and one of those packages of already-shredded cheese and by the time he gets to the cash register, she and Bo are gone.

The next time he sees her, it's dusk on a Wednesday night and he's on his way out to catch a Rangers game with his friends. She has a pizza under her arm and he can see a DVD of "Cars" stuffed under there too.

"Hot date?" he says, smiling at her.

"Hey, Billy," she says, and smiles back, and he feels like buzzing.


End file.
